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Grognor comments on Russian plan for immortality [link] - Less Wrong
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The poll results are intriguing. 35% would want cybernetic immortality at any and all cost! And yet I don't see 35% of people who can afford it signed up for cryonics.
35% of people who read the article and took the quiz right after reading. Admittedly the numbers are larger than I naively expected to get past each stage of filtering. I was thinking maybe 300 people taking the poll total and its over 30k now, with over 10k answering "at any cost". (I would love to see the log files for that page... referring URLs, IP addresses, etc.)
Because cryonics is not even close to "certain immortality now".
"Any and all cost" would subsume low probabilities if it were true (which, of course, it is not).
I don't see how. To me cost is what you pay, not what you get. If the poll said "an unknown but probably extremely small chance of cybernetic immortality", then it could be comparable to cryonics.
If an expectued utility maximizer is willing to pay a cost C to get a benefit with probability ~1, it should be willing to pay p*C to get the same benefit with probability p. If C is unbounded, then so is p*C even for very small p.
This was about real people, not ideal utility maximizers. Even if one agrees with "it should be willing to pay pC to get the same benefit with probability p", which most risk-averse people won't, "Any and all cost" does not mean infinite cost to most people (sacrificing their firstborn is probably not on the list, neither is killing the rest of the humanity).
If you want to question the assumption that's fine (I agree that people don't really want it at literally any cost), but don't complain that I gave the explanation you said you didn't see of how the assumption implies the conclusion.
Hey, I'd be more than willing to sign up for a couple hundred years of indentured servitude if that's what it took to pay for several thousand subsequent years. But I can't afford cryonics, and the fact that no one is willing to take up that offer of indentured servitude as payment for cryonics is very strong evidence against cryonics having a noteworthy probability of success.